Main navigation

Make Your Social Media Contests Effective

Social media contests are gaining popularity these days as one of the best ways to obtain followers and “likes”. However, if you are planning to sue such contests to gain new business, think again. Social contests and giveaways are good enough to boost your social presence and social stats. However, there is no guarantee that the participants of your social contests will engage with your page again once the winners are announced, even if they start to follow you. The good news is that there are exceptions where effective social media contests helped companies to gain new businesses. For this, you need to plan your contests thoroughly, aim your targeted audience correctly, and launch the contents under right circumstances.

To begin with, you need to have a proper goal. Just like your other online marketing efforts, social media contents need a clearly defined goal; otherwise, you cannot generate any value to it. Increasing the number of your followers on a particular social networking site cannot be defined as a clearly defined goal, when it comes to social contests. A good marketer should know that increasing the number of followers is just the beginning of your objective, not an end-goal of the contest.

You need to identify the real motive behind the contest. In most cases, the ultimate goal is revenue generation; however, social contest are also used as a tool for conducting research and surveys. You need to measure your ROI from the social media contest in terms of leads and conversions. And for that, you need to determine what you want to achieve with such social efforts and measure the ROI based on it. Social media contests can also help you to find your niche customers, who are interested in your particular product. Thus, revealing a new market opportunity to you.

Next comes the target. You need to define your target audience. As mentioned, most of the followers participating in your social contests hardly think beyond the prize. And there is no point catering to such audience, as they will hardly help you to obtain your goals. Thus, align your target audience according to your specific goal and market the social contest to exclusively them. Such targeted effort will also help you to gain faithful clients.

The prize matters, too. Most marketers believe the social contest prize should be attractive and trendy. Though trendy prize does attract many followers, it will lead to the same issue – your followers will never think beyond the prize. Three types of prizes are being offered at present when it comes to social contests – intangibles, third-party prizes, and products from the company running the contest. And it again needs a smart marketing strategy to produce an effective ROI in the prize offered. It must be planned in such as way that the prize should cost minimum, while providing an enormous success.

Comments

About Debajyoti Banerjee

Debajyoti Banerjee is Founder & CEO at Seven Boats Info-System- a leading strategic Internet Marketing company, Digital Marketing Trainer, Entrepreneur, Web Strategist & Internet Marketing Consultant in Kolkata area, India. Deba helps other businesses to transform their online presence, to attract new leads and to convert their prospects by his expert web consultancy. Get in touch with him on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter